Janet Vaughan

Who was Janet Vaughan?

Dame Janet Maria Vaughan DBE FRS was a British physiologist.

Vaughan was educated at home, and later at North Foreland Lodge and Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied medicine under Charles Sherrington and J. B. S. Haldane.

Later she received a scolarhip from the Rockefeller Foundation to study at Harvard University.

As a female doctor, discovered that she had difficulties gaining access to the patients and experimented on pigeons. Virginia Woolf described her as 'an attractive woman; competent, disinterested, taking blood tests all day to solve abstract problems'.

As a young pathologist at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith Hospital in 1938 she initiated creation of national blood banks in London. The modified milk bottle for blood collection and storage was named "MRC bottle" or "Janet Vaughan".

From 1945 until her retirement in 1967, she was Principal of Somerville College. She was made DBE in 1957, and elected FRS in 1979. She was Principal while Margaret Roberts studied there - a student who would later become British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.